Building Great PhotosCompositing Multiple Frames To Create One Great Image

By now you're no doubt
aware that you're being fooled on a daily basis. You know what I
mean--that new car looks much better in the brochure than in person,
that catalog full of furniture has the same sunset outside of every window,
and the weatherman on the local TV isn't really standing in front
of a giant map.
Chromakey, the effect where the weatherman stands in front of a green
screen and the maps are inserted electronically, has been around for 30
years, so we should be used to being tricked. For photographers it's
been a recent thing. While serious photographers have always built "slide
sandwiches" of different objects with a slide duplicator, the advent
of the computer as a darkroom and Adobe Photoshop in particular has made
it very easy to build composite images from a collection of parts.

While those fanciful "Pig with Wings" images are popular in
some circles, I tend to assemble images in order to create effects that
I just can't get in real life. Clients are getting so used to a
certain level of Photoshop compositing that I'll often get asked
to take pictures of incomplete product prototypes, unfinished office complexes
and wintery exteriors, only to insert product logos, full parking lots,
and summer greenery post-shoot. It is now common practice to shoot a product
clean and simple on a white background and then insert a fanciful surface
and realistic looking drop shadow.

In order to create really convincing composite images you have to have
the finished product in mind when creating your originals. I shoot a ton
of film and digital images every year, but often I find that it's
tough to put two images together without having a plan at the time of
the shoot.

This is especially true of the background. In order to create good composites
you'll need lots of great backgrounds to put your subjects into.
I always shoot background images whenever I travel. I have shots of New
England winters, L.A. evenings, and Cubs games at Wrigley. I have panoramic
shots of the Arizona desert and of Times Square. I shoot everything I
can at all times of the day, and I archive the film scans and digital
images on CD-ROMs. By doing this, I not only build up my own royalty-free
stock bank, but I ensure myself a good selection of unique images.

Clients are starting to get fed up with the "me-too" clip
art disks that everyone is using. It's embarrassing when four different
advertisements in a magazine use the exact same New York City skyline
shot!

Film Capture
In general, I prefer to shoot all of my backgrounds on medium format film.
That way I have a really high quality original from which I can pull incredibly
high-res scans if I need. If I shoot it digitally with a good camera like
a Canon D30 or Nikon D1X then I'm limited to a 10-17MB file. I routinely
generate 70MB files from my scanner that are amazingly clean and sharp,
so for now film still has a place in my work.

Background Separation
When shooting foreground images for composites you need to keep in mind
the amount of work that you want to create for yourself back at the computer.
While there are dozens of programs designed to strip images out of their
backgrounds, the fact is that delicate objects will require a great deal
of hand tweaking. I love the three tools in Photoshop 6.0--the Extract
tool, the Magic Eraser tool, and the Background Eraser tool--but
I still find myself reaching for Corel KnockOut 1.5 and Extensis Mask
Pro 2.0. Even with all of those tools at my disposal, I'm still
using the Pen tool and massaging selections by hand using the Quick Mask
option. I'm not going to go into a heavy Photoshop lesson here,
but before you can create composites you need to develop some expertise
at separating objects from their backgrounds.

Of particular importance when stripping out your foreground images are
the edges. Even if you manage to cleanly pop the image out of its background
you'll need to figure out how hard or soft you want the transition
to be, how dark or light the edges are in relation to the lighting, and
whether there should be a drop or cast shadow created by the object. To
give you an idea of how effective this technique can be check out the
images on these pages and the accompanying notes. In each case I used
a combination of images and techniques.

Combining various original images to create composite final images is
a fairly powerful technique. Thinking digitally when shooting, even with
film, makes it much easier to achieve the desired effect back at your
desktop. I shot almost all of these images on film and used Photoshop
to create the composites. In the old days many of these effects would
be impossible to create, yet now, with relatively modest skills, you can
do as well if not better with your own images.

Surreal Composites--A great technique is to take a collection
of original images and combine them to create a fanciful and surreal final
image. For this other-worldly desert scene I took four original film shots
of cactus plants taken in the Arizona desert. I scanned each cactus and
carefully stripped them out from their backgrounds. I then scanned a rather
spectacular desert sunset panorama shot I had and went to work. I placed
the four cactuses on top of the background panorama layer. I moved them
around and re-sized the various elements until I had a relatively nice
grouping. Once everything was in the right place I went to work on the
cactuses themselves. I used the Hue and Saturation controls to really
enhance the color, and used Levels and Curves to really make these plants
"pop."

I always loved this shot of the Casino sign, but felt it
would look better with a palm tree and a little sky. Three
separate images were composited to form a very realistic
looking finished image.

Enhancing Reality--This
shot taken on Las Vegas' famous Fremont Street has always been a
popular image of mine. The original shot was the "Casino"
sign against a black sky. To really make the image more dramatic I painstakingly
traced the outline of every bulb on the edge of the sign, then deleted
the background. I then took a shot I had of some palm trees in Los Angeles
and stripped out one long palm tree. I placed the tree behind the sign
and used the Lighting Effects in Photoshop to create the effect of a bright
orange light in the middle of the tree. Once that was done I zapped up
the color of the Casino sign by adjusting each color channel with the
levels control. To finish it off I created a nice cloudy evening sky using
the "Sky Effects" portion of KPT 6, a Photoshop plug-in. I
think the finished shot looks realistic, but extremely wild.

Sometimes it's just easier to composite a few shots
to create an effect. Here I shot the Akteo watch mounted
on a metal fixture with a few white cards to make it easier
to strip out later.

Compositing As A Production
Tool --Special effects are nice, but sometimes a client asks
for a look that is a lot easier to create in the computer than in front
of the camera. A perfect example is this shot done for French watchmaker
Akteo. In order to get the watches in exactly the right position and with
the right strap curvature we needed to mount the watches on custom-made
metal fixtures. To make the fixtures totally invisible takes a lot of
propping and fiddling. In the old days we would struggle with each watch,
hiding the fixtures and lighting the watch and the background as perfectly
as possible.

Once I had the watch separated from its background, it was
easy to drop it onto this nice purple background and add
a realistic drop shadow.

Today we have Photoshop, so
the client has figured out that it is much easier, faster, and cheaper
to just shoot two watches on a large fixture with a Canon D30, clip the
watches out from their background, and then add a background and shadow
later. Here you can see the original image in all its glory. Once the
background junk is removed the watch is given a hot green background and
realistic drop shadow. After a few hundred of these you get pretty good.

Sometimes it's just about fixing what Mother Nature
didn't provide. For this shot I never liked the relatively
plain looking sky.

Adding Drama--I
always loved this shot of rock guitarist Earl Slick, known for his work
with John Lennon, David Bowie, Little Caesar and Phantom, Rocker and Slick.
Shot just north of Los Angeles, the original was a dramatic shot and in
my portfolio for years. Recently, when I revamped my book, I thought this
image could use a little sprucing up. I found the original transparency
and pulled a clean unaltered scan. Once I had the image in digital form
I carefully clipped out the original bright afternoon sky, producing just
the foreground on a layer. I searched through my files looking for a dramatic
sky shot and found a very cool 35mm transparency shot from the Griffith
Observatory overlooking downtown Los Angeles. Once scanned the image had
to be pulled and stretched to fill the frame, and I had to clown a little
bit here and there to remove the city lights at the bottom of the frame.
Now I had the same image with an unbelievably dramatic sky, and it looks
like it was shot that way.